When you want to set up a website on the internet, the first thing you need is to have a hosting and domain. Although there are free platforms that give us the possibility of giving us a website or blog mounted like BlogSpot or WordPress.com, they come with many limitations. Therefore, it is always best to have the site in a paid hosting.
However, some people are not willing (or cannot) pay the price of hosting service (such as paid WordPress hosting). They see the first option of using a free hosting. Most of the time, they will end up getting problems, losing their website data with free hosting.
They see using a free hosting as a savings of USD 5 per month, but do not know that they have no guarantee at all. At any time, sooner or later, they will see how it was a lousy decision to save a few dollars a month and not buy a quality hosting service.
Personally, I only recommend free hosting for people who do not have much knowledge on these topics and want to test, learn, and just try messing around! Perhaps, you want to know how the tools work or for people who wish to test websites. That is the only logical use of free hosting. However, I never recommend it to host business websites.
That said, I want to share with you five reasons why we should not use a free hosting:
5 Reasons why NOT to use a free hosting for business website
They are “typical” hosting services with the difference of being free. Therefore, you do not have to spend any dollars. In return, you have to endure many things such as constant downtime, less privacy, no guarantee of data loss and more.
If you want to have a respectable site on the internet, using free hosting is not recommended. Here are five reasons why NOT to use it:
1 You do not own your website.
By not owning your site, you have no power over it. The company that provides you with free hosting can at anytime remove your site from its server for whatever reason. They do this anytime whenever they think you go against their policies
2. Unwanted Ads
Companies that offer free hosting have to cover the costs in one way or another. In most cases, they do so by inserting advertising ads on the websites you host. Banners and popups will appear all over your site. Of course, you cannot control them at all.
3. It offers little credibility
For only $ 5USD per month, you can buy good quality hosing. It is something you can control. Furthermore, additional investment between $ 1 USD to $ 15USD a year will give you a professional domain name.
If you do not want to pay this small fee, you are telling the world that you are someone unprofessional who does not take your business very seriously.
4. NO Technical Support
Free WordPress hosting providers have no budget to hire technical support staff, data backup and restoration. If their sever is infected by malicious virus, every sites hosted get infected too, some lose the entire data. Therefore, when there are problems, you itself has to fix them alone.
You get what you pay. No other choice!
On other hand, when you pay for a hostingraja web hosting, you have a support team that is ready to help you as many times as necessary to solve your problems.
5. Unreliable service
Free WordPress hosting is very unpredictable. They have a terrible reputation in the uptime of the service, in the speed of the site or the availability. In the end, they try to put as many sites as possible in the least amount of servers available. This condition causes a massive error that causes websites down for long hours.
Wrapping up
If you still want to use free hosting, I recommend you to at least invest in your domain. This way, your website looks a bit professional. However, when you are ready to do serious business, it is highly recommended not to choose a free web hosting services. Remember that you are setting up a website on the Internet to generate income. If you want to have a real website that works, it is best to pay for a quality hosting.